


This Settling Dust

by BeaArthurPendragon



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Clint Barton Gets an Intervention, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Past Matt Murdock/Karen Page, Plot with a little porn, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Protective Natasha Romanov, Rhodey Does Not Have Time For This Shit, Steve Rogers Gets His Groove Back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:54:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22405309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeaArthurPendragon/pseuds/BeaArthurPendragon
Summary: After Thanos snaps his fingers, Matt Murdock makes an unimaginable deal to save New York City. When Natasha Romanoff shows up in Hell's Kitchen to ask for his help, they realize they just might save each other, too.Familiarity with Netflix's Daredevil series is helpful but not strictly necessary.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Matt Murdock & Steve Rogers, Matt Murdock/Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov
Comments: 41
Kudos: 124
Collections: Marvel Trumps Hate 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GraceNM](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GraceNM/gifts).



> Written for the wonderful [gracenm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GraceNM/pseuds/GraceNM), whose generous Marvel Trumps Hate donation will help support [ProPublica](https://www.propublica.org/)'s mission to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable through its commitment to excellent in-depth public interest journalism.
> 
> Matt Murdock and Natasha Romanoff are a canon ship in the comics, and it's a shame they don't get more love in fic. Here's hoping this helps fill a gap I know we aren't alone in feeling. 
> 
> Thanks so much to my betas, [dragongirlG](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragongirlG/pseuds/dragongirlG), [powercrow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/powercrow/pseuds/powercrow), and withinmelove for helping me keep everyone in character and helping the story make sense for non-Daredevil fans.

The ashes smelled like burned coffee.

He’d wanted to tell someone but there was no one left to tell. Karen and Foggy’s heartbeats had simply vanished—their entire presences had vanished—at the same moment that he heard Maggie’s phone clatter to the floor.

He ran first to Karen’s desk, trying to find her, to touch her, but the air had closed around her and there was nothing there but that scent—and he began to panic in a way that he hadn’t done since he was nine, when he was newly blind and afraid of everything he couldn’t immediately understand with his hands, his ears, his nose.

“Karen, sweetheart, talk to me,” he said urgently, with a voice so tight it came out as little more than a whisper. Fingers sifted through fine grit on the desk, the chair—he rubbed it between his fingertips and it reminded him of his father’s ashes and then he began to panic for real.

He touched her chair, her desk, his own watch—confirming that it was they who had vanished, not him, that he was still in his office in the backroom of Foggy’s brother’s deli, that it was a little after 11 a.m. on April 27, 2018, that somehow he was still here.

“Foggy?” he cried, scrambling over to his best friend’s desk, half running, half-crawling, arms outstretched, searching for him, not finding him. “No, no, no, no, no,” Matt said, as much to God as anyone, and swept his hands through the dust again in search of the man who wasn’t there.

“Theo!” he cried, and the door banged open immediately because Foggy’s brother was already on his way.

“People are just—” Theo said, skidding over to his side. “Oh, Foggy, no, no, no—”

Then the screaming started.

It felt like it didn’t end for weeks.

*******

Matt got to work.

Half of humanity—half of every living being in the universe—had vanished. He didn’t think he’d ever get over those panicked early days of running door to door to make sure suddenly-orphaned babies weren’t starving in their cribs, of scrambling to secure the grocery stores and pharmacies that were still open, of having to choose which looters to fight and which to walk away from because even he couldn’t handle them all.

Of stumbling home a little before dawn, bruised and bloody, to curl up and weep into Karen’s pillow until sleep finally collapsed over him.

The National Guard arrived late on the fifth day, or half of them, anyway, but it wasn’t enough. Every nonviolent offender had been summarily paroled from prison with an ankle monitor because there were no longer enough guards to manage them all, and then two days later they released everyone in pretrial detention altogether. Of course, there weren’t enough people to supervise the monitors, either—keeping Matt even busier. The city was boiling over.

The hockey rink at Madison Square Garden was commandeered and turned into a makeshift morgue; the number of people who died because half the world was no longer around to take care of them was breathtaking. It wasn’t just the people riding in the planes and trains and buses that crashed when whoever was behind the wheel vanished, but the people the planes and trains and buses struck. It was the fires that couldn’t get fought and the heart attacks there weren’t enough ambulances for and the unattended children running into traffic and the people killed in riots and robberies and dear Jesus, more suicides than Matt had ever thought possible. It was the four—no, five—mass poisonings and one gassing by apocalyptic end-timers seeking to hasten the Kingdom of God.

There were no heroes left in New York, either, he realized. Luke and Jessica were gone. Danny was in China last Matt heard, though he was pretty sure he’d have answered the phone by now if he could. Misty and Colleen were gone. The spider-kid in Queens and Deadpool were both gone and even Frank Castle was gone—and his despair over losing the Punisher made him realize how well and truly fucked they all were.

He took the armor he’d given up out of the trunk in the closet. He couldn’t afford the luxury of fretting over the symbolism of whether or not he deserved it anymore. He was all New York had left. He had to stay alive.

He had no allies left, either—Brett, Claire, and Marci were all gone. All the Nelsons were gone, too, except for Theo.

An office without Foggy and Karen’s heartbeats. An office that smelled like burnt coffee. A bed that smelled less and less like Karen every day.

One Sunday, Theo packed up Foggy’s apartment and Matt packed up Karen’s. Theo stored Foggy’s things in the office. Matt took Karen’s things home.

Stacking her boxes against the back wall of his apartment was the closest they’d ever get to living together, to sharing a life. They had just barely found their way back to each other and she was gone.

Thanos had said his culling was impartial, but it felt pretty fucking partial to Matt.

Sometime on the twelfth or thirteenth day—though he’d slept so little he’d lost track—he found a thick folded notecard with _WE CAN SAVE OUR CITY_ carefully punched in elementary braille. There was a date, a time, an address. It was signed _WILSON FISK_.

It was what Matt had feared, of course—that the Kingpin had survived, that he had been released with all the others awaiting trial for their crimes, that he was free to rebuild his crime empire and spread his cancer throughout the city once more.

Fisk’s offer was both unimaginable and unrefusable: He would negotiate a truce with all the major crime syndicates in the city and together they would cut the crime rate in half—as long as Matt left the gangs alone and refused to testify against Fisk when his case went to court.

“Without my testimony, the U.S. Attorney will have nothing. She’ll have to throw your case out.”

“That’s true, Mr. Murdock, but consider the alternative: I can and will release your identity to the world,” Fisk said mildly, sipping a cup of expensive tea and gazing out over the half-dead city from the penthouse he’d reclaimed, his silk suit rustling softly with each sip. “Even if you aren’t disbarred, even if the DA doesn’t throw out every case you’ve ever defended, every criminal in this city will know who you are, where you live, and _where you work_.”

_Theo._

“Take a day to think about it,” Fisk said with menacing magnanimity. “Send me your answer tomorrow.”

That night, after he and Theo closed up shop, Matt told him everything. Told him he was Daredevil, told him how his powers worked, told him that the bumps and bruises he always had weren’t just battle scars from being blind in a chaotic, crowded city. 

Told him about the deal he’d made with Fisk. Told him what the stakes were—for Matt and for him. Told him he was going to move his office out of the shop that night, that he couldn’t risk putting Theo in that kind of danger.

“You already have,” Theo said, though he sounded more resigned than angry about it. “You think Fisk or his goons won’t use me as leverage just because I’m not your landlord anymore? You think he was too dumb not to realize that you moved out to protect me?”

Matt blinked away a frustrated tear—Christ, it took nothing to make him cry anymore. “Fuck.”

Theo just shook his head and said, “I’ve already had the worst day of my life. I’ll take my chances with Fisk.” Then he wiped away a tear of his own and added in a small voice, “Please don’t leave me alone here.”

Matt took the deal.

Fisk was true to his word. Matt watched from the rooftops as Fisk struck deals with the Dogs of Hell, the Carbone family, the Yakuza, the Chinatown Triad, Bushmaster’s Jamaicans, the Bratva—anyone with the sense to understand that there was no sense fighting, as Fisk said every time, to become captain of a sinking ship.

And gradually, gradually—the screaming stopped.

The rioting petered out and crime began to subside to manageable levels. The gangs not only kept the peace, but they began to shore up city agencies, running food banks and sponsoring clinics, boarding up looted storefronts and abandoned apartments, collecting the garbage and towing abandoned cars. They did it quietly, under other names, using Wilson Fisk’s money—shell charities and potemkin nonprofits that blended in with the dozens of other benevolent associations that were already beginning to spring up. Wilson Fisk was saving the city and almost nobody realized it.

With their help, the city began to limp back from the brink.

It helped that this was New York, and if there was one thing a city of nine million—now 4.5 million—had built into its pool of human capital, it was redundancy. In time, enough skilled people were found and trained to restore some measure of bus and subway service, to maintain the power plants and sewers, to staff the schools and hospitals. And once people from the suburbs began to pour into the city in search of functioning infrastructure, it began to feel—dare he say it— _alive_ again. 

Eventually the truce would end and the Devil would come for his due—Matt knew this. He just prayed he’d have enough to pay the bill when the time came.

And now? Six months since the Snap, the peace was holding. Oh, there was still plenty of crime to fight, but there was also more legal work than Matt knew what to do with. He’d effectively become a full-time probate lawyer on top of his usual defense work; as part of its emergency response legislative package, Congress had reduced the mandatory seven-year waiting period for declarations of death to three months.

That meant today, like every day, there was a line of people outside Nelson Fine Meats that morning, waiting for Matt to open his office in the back room at 8 a.m., looking to claim their lost loved ones’ (and not-so-loved-ones’) estates.

“You look like shit, Matt,” Theo said mildly, passing him a cup of coffee over the counter.

“Not as bad as you do,” Matt said back, and they both tried to smile.

Meat was in short supply now, so Theo had started to sell other things, too—coffee, for one, muffins and bread baked by the suddenly unemployed wedding planner who lived next door to him, vegetables grown on the roof of his apartment building by the retired grandmother on the third floor who no longer had a grandchild to dote on. The economy was a mess and money was hard to come by, so he’d begun to take barter, too—often cigarettes and booze, but mostly cell phones abandoned by the vanished. He kept the whiskey for himself and sold the rest.

Elektra had left Matt more than enough in her will to live on for the rest of his life, so he didn’t even bother charging his clients. He worked because the work needed to be done, and because it kept him connected to the lives of the people he fought to save every night. If people did try to pay him, he took it, but he’d just drop it all into the collection plate at Mass on Sundays.

It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

*******

He tried not to blame the Avengers after it happened. Tony Stark was a blowhard on his best days, but even he couldn’t conceal his stunned agony at the press conference he gave when he told the world that Thanos was gone, but that the damage he’d done couldn’t be reversed. Romanoff and Rogers had come with him, and though they didn’t speak or take questions, the rage and grief pouring off them told Matt all he needed to know about how narrowly they’d missed.

He’d looked Rogers up once after he moved to Brooklyn, dropped by one evening in the mask and suit to feel him out, see what kind of an ally he’d make when it came time to take Fisk down. But the conversation had lasted less than a minute: He’d told Matt in no uncertain terms that he was retired now, that the world didn’t need Captain America anymore, that it was time to start making a difference in other ways like Stark, who was replacing the nation’s power plants to arc reactors, like Thor, who was resettling his people in Norway.

It was all bullshit, of course—the man was carrying the weight of four billion lost lives on his shoulders, just counting the humans, and he was spooked halfway to hell over it. Matt knew that there was no absolution he could offer that Rogers would accept.

The next Sunday afternoon, though, Matt took the train to Red Hook and walked five blocks to Kominsky’s Gym to work out on the bags while Rogers coached some neighborhood kids. Rogers was no dummy, though, knew the sudden appearance of a new face so soon after his chat with Daredevil wasn’t a coincidence, so he sent the kids to run a few laps around the block and then approached the heavy bag that Matt was slowly, steadily beating to death.

“You’re good,” he said. _For a blind guy_ , he didn’t say.

“I know,” Matt said, not stopping.

“Pretty far from Hell’s Kitchen, though.” _I know you’re Daredevil_.

Matt quirked a little half-smile, then spun a hard kick at the bag to show off, because the gym was otherwise empty and because he felt like it. “I like to keep an eye out for new talent.”

Rogers huffed softly at that. “I told you: I’m retired.”

“No, you’re not. You’ve just got the yips, is all,” Matt said, slapping the bag to still its swaying. “Hold that, would you?”

Rogers leaned into the bag, and Matt aimed a series of hard, fast punches at it, so quick that Rogers couldn’t anticipate them all.

“Jesus,” Rogers said.

“It’s not enough, you know,” Matt said, stopping suddenly. “Me. I’m good but I’m not enough.” He waved in the general direction of the window. “Not against all this.”

Rogers’ body stilled dangerously.

“None of us are enough,” he said quietly.

“Says the 95-pound weakling who was willing to risk dying from asthma before he got out of boot camp for just a chance to kill Hitler.”

Rogers stepped back just as Matt was delivering another strike to the bag, causing it to swing unexpectedly and pull Matt off balance. “Do you know who our allies were in Europe during that war?” he asked.

“Britain and France,” Matt gasped, dancing neatly to the side to recover his stance.

“And the Soviet Union. Stalin. Because we needed someone to hold the Eastern Front more than we needed to keep our hands clean,” Rogers said, with a bitterness that shocked Matt to the bone. “So don’t come crying to me about making your bed with Wilson Fisk. The deal’s doing exactly what you need it to do: buying you the time you need to help the city rebuild. Use it wisely, stay close to Fisk, and you’ll know how curb him when the time comes. If anyone can do that, it’s you. You know him better than anyone.”

“I wouldn’t even need this deal if you weren’t hiding out here, licking your wounds,” Matt muttered, walloping the bag so that it swung hard into Rogers’ shoulder. “New York is your _home_ , goddammit. I don’t care how badly you got beat, that’s got to count for something.”

Rogers sighed, put his hands on his hips, and paced a tight circle as he considered his answer. “It does,” he finally said, his voice barely a whisper, his heart pounding in a panicky skitter Matt never dreamed he would hear coming from Captain America. “But trust me, you’re better off without me right now.”

“You could have called us, you know,” Matt said bitterly, hitting the bag one last time. “Us, the X-Men—you didn’t have to face him alone.”

“Go home,” Rogers said angrily, and turned away toward the door as the first of the kids returned from their laps. “You look like shit. Get some sleep and a decent meal for a change. New York needs you.”

Matt stepped away from the bag and began to unwind his boxing wraps. “You know where to find me if you change your mind.”

Rogers waved over his shoulder as he walked toward the kids streaming in through the door. “I won’t.”

*******

That evening, a heavy thunderstorm rolled in around six, just as Matt was showing his last client of the day to the door.

“Josie’s?” Theo asked over the chatter of the day’s receipts churning out of the cash register. Friday nights were usually busy ones for Matt, but he could feel the barometric pressure bottoming out and the electricity crackling in the air and knew it would be suicide for him to patrol out in the mess that was about to come their way.

He used to not worry about that so much, but he couldn’t afford to make mistakes anymore.

“Guess so,” Matt said.

An hour later, they were sitting at the bar, halfway into their second beers, still damp from the mad half-block dash they’d made from the shop to the bar on the corner. The bar was doing brisk business despite the downpour, and Matt was playing wingman for Theo, who was busy chatting up a funny, sarcastic nurse from Metro-General just looking for some dick to help her forget another exhausting day at the end of the world.

Matt didn’t mind being ignored; his memories of Foggy were company enough here. They’d been coming to this bar since Matt’s 21st birthday, and his big, ebullient presence still seemed to fill every corner. Every song on the jukebox—the lineup had not changed in 20 years—reminded him of Foggy’s off-key singing; every clack of the billiard balls reminded him how Foggy always, always won; every time Theo laughed, it reminded him of how happy a drunk Foggy was, how quick to hug and snuggle and make grand plans for their law practice. In Foggy’s mind—and Matt’s—they were in it for life; platonic soulmates who would, if Foggy had his way, would work together and marry together and vacation together and probably die on the same day together for all Matt knew.

In his darker moments, Matt wondered if they actually had died on the same day, if what they were going through now was really life or just hell.

He wasn’t the only one. People were still talking about the Snap, about the people they lost and how they were getting by now, how much the government was paying Tony Stark and who was going to run the city when martial law was lifted at the end of the year.

And then he caught a sharp murmur in the back corner—a man, middle aged, Bronx Italian from the accent, swearing under his breath and muttering, “Shit. He’s really going through with it.”

“Who’s going through with what?” his drinking buddy said. Turk Barrett, of course—the only reason one of Rosalie Carbone’s guys would be haunting the Kitchen at happy hour. Turk had cornered the market on abandoned firearms early on; now he had exclusive contracts with most of the major gangs. 

“Fisk,” the man said. “He’s gonna run for mayor.”

Matt’s heart guttered into his stomach. Of course this was Fisk’s endgame—he’d kept the gangs so busy restoring the city that they didn’t realize all they were doing was fixing the place up so Fisk could move in.

Matt felt for Theo’s arm and tapped it to get his attention. “I’m gonna turn in early for a change,” he said. In the nurse’s direction he added, “Nice meeting you, Emily.”

“Amy.”

Theo stood to give him a hug, which startled Matt until he realized it was just an excuse to whisper, “Something up?” into his ear. “You’ve got that look.”

“Maybe,” Matt said. “I don’t know yet.”

“That sounds like a yes.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“You better,” Theo said, squeezing him unexpectedly. “I’m all out of people to lose right now.”

Matt blinked back a surprise tear and squeezed him back. “I know. Me too.”

*******

The storm had abated just enough by the time Matt got home that he decided to risk suiting up and making his way back to the alley behind Josie’s. He crouched in the inadequate shelter of a nearby doorway and concentrated on the window closest to where Turk and the Carbone stooge were sitting, hoping they were still there. It was still raining too hard for him to get a good bead on the place through the window, but just as he was about to give up, he heard Turk howl in laughter at something on the other side of the glass and decided to wait a little longer.

“Murdock.”

Matt closed his eyes, cursed himself for missing her approach. He was further off his game than he realized.

“Romanoff,” he said. He didn’t turn to face her. “What brings you to Hell’s Kitchen?”

“You,” she said.

“Kinda busy right now,” Matt said.

“Look, you’re not going to fix this tonight, so let’s get out of this mess before one of us gets ourselves killed.”

She must have seen lightning, because Matt felt rather than heard a bone-rattling crash of thunder and then the chatter of hail against the steel containers stacked up on the West Side docks. They only had a few minutes, maybe, before the storm’s second wind reached them.

He sighed. “Follow me.”

He scrambled up the fire escape to the roof and Romanoff followed easily—she wasn’t even breathing hard when she got to the top. _Enhanced_ , Matt thought. Not like Rogers, though—more like him: a little bit of extra juice and a whole hell of a lot of training. He’d read about the Red Room, of course, knew about the ways the Russians experimented on the little girls in their care, and he felt his heart begin to pound as an old rage began to awaken.

So many child soldiers.

He led her across the rooftops to the building on the corner of 48th and 9th and opened the stairwell door for her. “Just through there,” he said.

“Didn’t expect you to bring me home on the first date,” she said as she descended the stairs into his living room.

“I’m willing to bet you already know where I live,” Matt said, removing his helmet and pushing his cowl back. “You know my name, you know where I work, and you clearly know about my bargain with Fisk. How am I doing so far?”

“Not bad,” she said, using her hand to shake some of the water out of her hair. “Here’s one more thing I know: You’re in way, way over your head.”

 _How would you know?_ Matt wanted to ask, but bit back the question. “So just another Friday night, then,” he said instead, crossing to the linen closet. He took out two towels and threw one to Romanoff. “You can hang your wet things up in the bathroom. There’s a robe in there you can use.”

She paused, facing him for a moment, then tilted her head. Was there a smile, too? He wondered.

He waited until she shut the bathroom door to go into the bedroom to change. Sweats and a t-shirt, he decided—if she’d meant to fight him, she would have already.

When he came out, he found her in the kitchen, refrigerator door open. He realized with a start that she was wearing the robe Karen had left at his place—the scent of the lavender lotion she liked still lingered on the cotton—and he swallowed back his rage that he had forgotten to tell her not to touch that one.

“No one’s coming back tonight expecting to wear this, are they?” Natasha asked, rummaging through the fridge without looking at him. “I really don’t want to have to explain why I’m here.”

“I’d love nothing more, actually,” Matt said quietly. “But she’s gone.”

That got her attention. She stood and turned toward him, pizza box still in hand. “Thanos?”

“Yes,” Matt said softly.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Everyone’s sorry,” Matt said, then after a tense moment waved vaguely at the pizza. “Help yourself.”

Natasha flipped the box open. “Pineapple,” she murmured absently, and from the stumble of her heartbeat he knew she’d lost someone she loved, too.

He selected a piece of his own and took a large bite. “I take it you haven’t come to me for legal advice, Miss Romanoff,” he said as he chewed. “What do you need from me?”

“I need you to not go after Fisk,” Natasha said. “At least not yet.”

“Oh?” Matt said, huffing a soft laugh toward her. “What’s your game?”

“It would give me no pleasure to see Wilson Fisk move into Gracie Mansion, though from what I’ve seen happening around the rest of the world, New York could do a whole lot worse,” she said. “But he’s useful.”

“Why? You cut a deal with him, too?”

“No,” she said. “But you’re not his only enemy, and when his campaign goes public—”

“Everyone’s going to start coming out of the woodwork.”

“Bingo.”

“Got someone particular in mind?”

Natasha paused, and Matt heard her heartbeat flutter—just as it had when she noticed the pineapple on the pizza. This was personal, then.

“He calls himself Ronin,” Natasha said, pausing before articulating the name. “He lost his family in the decimation, and now it’s Frank Castle all over again, taking out gangs left and right across the country, no survivors. Only he uses a sword instead of a gun. And he’s good, too. No fingerprints, no hair, no DNA. He’s a ghost.”

“What did he call himself before?” Matt asked.

Natasha shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It obviously does to you,” Matt said, taking another bite. “You know him well enough to know he likes pineapple on his pizza. You know him well enough to want to protect his identity from me. That probably means you know him well enough to know that you can’t trust yourself to take him down alone.”

Natasha shook her head quickly. “I don’t want you to help me take him down, I want you to help me bring him in,” she said. “And yeah, it _is_ personal. He gave me a second chance once—one I never deserved. I owe him this.”

Matt let out a low laugh. “So your plan is, what? Let Fisk run this city into the ground while you watch and wait till your wayward buddy shows up?”

“He’ll come long before that happens,” Natasha said with confidence Matt can tell she didn’t quite feel. 

“How do you know that?”

She gave a tiny shrug. “He still thinks he’s saving people,” she said softly. “I can’t explain it, but he does. He’ll make his move before Fisk can do too much harm.”

“Where’s the rest of your team on this? I know you didn’t all get dusted.”

“I never said he was an Avenger.”

“You said you wanted to _bring him in_ ,” Matt said.

“I just meant I didn’t want him killed,” she said. There was a practiced steadiness to her voice that would have fooled anyone except him, because heartbeats always told the truth.

Ronin was an Avenger.

“It’s not Rogers, is it?”

“No,” she said, so quickly he didn’t even need to check her heartbeat to confirm that she was telling the truth. “God, no. Steve wasn’t—no wife. No children.”

“Miss Romanoff, if I’m going to help you, I need to know who all the players on the board are.”

“Steve’s not on the board,” Natasha said forcefully—angrily, even. “At all.”

“Then tell me who it is,” Matt said patiently. “If I’m going to help you, I need to know what he’s capable of, physically and otherwise. I can perceive a lot of things with my powers but I still can’t see, so the more I can anticipate his actions, the more effective I’ll be.”

There was a long silence as Natasha ate and thought. Matt could practically feel her heart breaking as she approached her decision, and he didn’t envy her. She was going to tell him—he knew this—but he would take no pleasure in his victory.

“It’s Barton, okay?” she said finally, so quietly that no one except Matt could have heard her. “Hawkeye. He was retired. He was done fighting. Then he saw his whole family disappear and—”

“Punisher 2.0.”

Natasha nodded. “I have to save him,” she said. “Please help me.”

“You can’t save people who don’t want to be saved,” he said gently. “Believe me, I’ve tried.”

“I have to try.”

“I know,” Matt said. “But you should be prepared for the possibility that he won’t—” he shrugged.

“No,” she said, heart pounding indignantly. “The minute I believe he can’t be helped is the minute I give up on him. And I won’t do that. I’ll never do that.”

Christ, she was as bad as he was. “Okay, Miss Romanoff,” he said.

“Natasha,” she said. “Call me Natasha.”

“Natasha,” he said. “I’ll help you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading so far! Comments give me life!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt learns what Clint means to Natasha. Steve is a stubborn idiot.

She moved in two days later. Matt’s dining table became their operations center; Matt’s sofa became her bed. She was gentle when she’d asked permission to move Karen’s unpacked boxes into the alcove beneath the stairs in order to make room for a complicated electronic device that was capable of 3-D digital displays. When Matt picked one up to help, the dust scraped softly beneath his fingers, and the sensation sent him spiraling anew. Natasha placed a quiet hand on his shoulder, then turned to pick up the next box.

It was jarring to share his space with a woman who wasn’t Karen, to wake up to a different shampoo, a different set of footsteps, a different voice.

Not that he’d ever even gotten to properly live with Karen. They were getting there, Matt thought—her studio in Astoria was merely a formality by the time she vanished, a fallback position in case Matt fucked up again, got so wrapped up in the mask that he forgot the life he lived during the day. But for three months he’d had the privilege of coming home from his patrols to find her in his bed, the privilege of waking up next to her in the morning. The privilege of her forgiveness. The privilege of her love.

Sometimes he’d come home from work to find Natasha talking to her team—just voices and columns of energy to Matt, though she explained they were holograms. She didn’t mind him listening in, learning about the planets that Nebula and Rocket and Danvers were out trying to stabilize, the governments on Earth that Okoye and Rhodes were trying their damndest to shore up. It was at once encouraging and desperately hopeless, to think that this was all there was left.

Sometimes she checked in with the remaining X-Men, too; Logan was still there, Kitty, Rogue, and Cyclops, too. Sometimes they teamed up for something bad, but for the most part they had to spread out and do what they could on their own, trading information, keeping in touch as best they could, holding the world together as best they could.

To what end, Matt wasn’t sure. To keep going, he supposed. That was all anyone could do.

Sometimes—more days than not, honestly—there were no updates, and instead they just talked. Surface conversation, war stories, the near-misses they could laugh about later. They compared weapons, fighting styles. They talked a little bit about the friends they lost in the Snap—Sam Wilson and Foggy and Nick Fury and Brett. Sometimes Barton, but only in operational terms: where he was, where he was headed next.

They did not talk about Karen. They did not talk about Rogers.

He was growing to like her, he realized. They were a lot alike in many ways, broken in the same ways, too—both orphans, trained as child soldiers to fight wars they no longer believed in, still trying to figure out their places in the world. She talked about the Red Room sometimes; he talked about Stick. They understood each other. That was comforting.

And, though he would never articulate this out loud, it was nice to have someone to come home to. Someone to notice if he didn’t. Someone to breathe the same air day in and day out. Theo had been right about not wanting to be alone.

Maybe that was enough.

*******

Some evenings they didn’t talk much at all, just sat on the sofa, turned on some music, and read for a few hours. Sometimes he’d notice her noticing the way his fingers moved across the braille of his book, notice the way she’d turn her head ever so slightly and hold her breath as she watched him.

He knew she watched him other times, too, watched the way he touched and listened and sniffed the air, the way he folded his money and the way he felt his way around the apartment first thing in the morning, before coffee and a shower woke him up enough for him to focus his powers. Watched the way he unfolded his cane and donned his sunglasses every time he left the house. Watched him put them away at night. Watched the way his acid-scarred eyes never focused, never landed on anything.

She watched but she didn’t stare. There was a general curiosity, yes, but something else. Professional interest, he thought; she was partly assessing his effectiveness, but also memorizing his blindness so she wouldn’t forget when it mattered.

“What I do is an enhanced form of echolocation, using ambient sound and vibrations to give me a kind of impressionistic picture of my surroundings,” he’d explained early on. “It’s sensitive enough that I can perceive small shapes and subtle movements. I can feel microscopic changes in temperature and air pressure, detect smells so faint you’d never notice them even if you tried. But I can’t perceive color or light,” he said, pointing toward the electronic billboard across the street. “I know the billboard’s on because I can hear the buzz from here, but I can’t tell you what it says.”

“How do you tell people apart? If we get into a fight, how can I be sure you don’t mistake me for a bad guy?”

He waved the question away. “Believe me, you’d rather not know.”

“Try me,” Natasha said, crossing her arms. “I’m guessing you can recognize my footsteps?”

“And your heartbeat,” Matt said. “And I know what you smell like—not just the specific combination of products you use, but _you_ , your sweat, your breath, your…body.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, took a step back, made himself as unthreatening as possible. “Like I said, you probably didn’t want to know.”

This would never get easier. He would always remember how Foggy had reacted when he first found out what he was, how angry and scared and betrayed he’d been when he discovered Matt half-dead in his Daredevil armor on his living room floor, how close his lies had come to breaking them. He would always brace himself for the possibility that this would be the last thing he ever told a person.

But Natasha just gave him a soft laugh. “Well, I’m in it now. What else can you tell about me?”

“I can’t always catch facial expressions, but I can guess your mood by whether your body temperature rises, whether your breathing changes. When Rhodey texts you, I can’t read the message on your phone but I can tell if it’s good news or not by the way your heartbeat responds. I can tell whether or not you’re lying. Yes, even you,” he said. Right now, Natasha’s heartbeat was quick, but she was keeping her breath steady, her posture relaxed. “I can tell you don’t quite believe me yet. I can tell you want to.”

_You can’t just do that! It’s weird and invasive and—wait. Are you telling me that ever since I’ve known you, everytime I wasn’t telling the truth, you knew? And you just played along?_

_Basically._

_Was anything ever real with us?_

That Foggy had forgiven him, come back to him, had seemed like a miracle. Matt had not deserved that. He never would.

“You must know a lot of things about people you wish you didn’t,” Natasha said finally.

“So do you, I imagine.”

“Not like that.”

Matt shrugged. “Why do you think I do what I do?”

*******

Rhodes was frustrated. Leads were scarce, Fisk wasn’t the only gangster in the world trying to consolidate his power, and not every mass gang slaughter was Barton’s work. Still, Rhodes was able to roughly track him as he made his way first across the Midwest and into Canada and Alaska before turning south again toward the West Coast. By late September Barton had been spotted in Albuquerque, then at some point he’d dropped into Mexico and was pushing further south. A massacre in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, might have been him; another in Guatemala City the day before Halloween was almost certainly so.

He was spotted in New Orleans in early November and a week after that, a biker gang out of Pine Bluff that supplied half the illicit Oxy in southeastern Arkansas met a grisly end. When the same fate befell a heroin ring in west Tennessee, his path became clear: He was slowly making his way to New York.

*******

The worst part of his job, Matt was beginning to realize, wasn’t the work itself. It wasn’t the brutality of negotiating between two sisters—who had both lost their children in the Snap—over custody of their vanished cousin’s baby son, or remaining calm as Mr. Ruiz broke the contract to sell his vanished twin brother’s apartment for the third time just in case he came back, or assuaging the unexpected guilt of a widower seeking to declare his vanished wife dead so he could marry the woman he’d been having an affair with for the past two years.

The worst part was when a client from before the Snap arrived and spotted the boxes of Foggy’s belongings stacked up in the back of the office. The worst part was the tentative “Mr. Nelson, too?” and Matt having to say “yes” again and again and again. The worst part was the clumsy condolences, the bitten back sobs, the unexpected hugs. The worst part was feeling, over and over and over again, how much they had loved him, and how much Foggy had loved them.

Because he had. Foggy—his best friend, his north star, the man who had held out his hand when Matt got so lost behind his mask he barely knew who he was anymore—loved everyone.

The worst part was that every time a client cried over him, Matt’s heart broke all over again.

*******

As Thanksgiving approached, the suicide rate ticked back up.

An overwhelmed cop shot himself in Times Square. Five women who had lost their children in the Snap held hands and jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge. An old man unable to face the holiday without his wife of 60 years opened the doors to the pigeon cote he kept on the roof of his apartment building, then climbed over the parapet and stepped into the air.

Mostly, though, people went quietly in their homes, often unnoticed, often alone. The smell of death was everywhere, a low blanket of rot and piss and blood and vomit clinging to the rooftops in the cold night air. Every night, it seemed, Matt ended his patrol at a payphone, calling the police to report another.

The night before Thanksgiving there were six in Hell’s Kitchen alone.

The next day, Theo brought over a roast and beer. They ate a quiet lunch together, admitted they were all glad there was no turkey, no parade, no football, nothing to remind them of life before, when Matt—and then Karen, too—would squeeze in around the Nelson’s family table, deafened from half a dozen different conversations and children’s squabbles and the neverending loop of jigs and reels from the Chieftains’ greatest hits CD playing on repeat over the stereo.

After lunch, they put on a marathon of movies Matt could follow so they’d have an excuse not to talk about it. So Theo wouldn’t have to spend the day by himself.

When he finally did leave, he and Matt hugged in the hallway until the elevator came. “See you tomorrow,” Theo said gruffly, but Matt could only nod.

That night, Matt suited up and went back out into the night and found ten more suicides by dawn.

*******

The next Saturday night, Natasha was still awake when Matt got in. She was hunched over the sofa, her knee jiggling a tattoo of anxiety that seemed to fill the room.

“Working late?” Matt asked as he jogged down the stairs, only realizing when he reached the bottom that he could catch the scent of his good bourbon. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“You know I can tell you’re lying, right?”

She held up her phone. “Rhodey called. Clint took out an entire KKK Klavern in southern Indiana tonight.”

“I wish I felt sadder about that than I do,” Matt said grimly.

Natasha huffed softly. “I wish I didn’t feel as sad as I do.”

“Why?”

“It’s his daughter’s 13th birthday,” she said after a long moment. “Lila. She was supposed to come to New York for a girl’s weekend next week. I was going to surprise her with tickets to _Hamilton_.”

“I’m sorry,” Matt said, sitting at the foot of the stairs.

“He spent her birthday killing people,” Natasha explained, taking a big swallow of bourbon. “I don’t care how much they deserved it—it scares me.”

“What do you think it means?”

“That he’s giving up,” she said softly. “He’s letting go of the man he used to be. He’s letting himself become Ronin.”

“I know you don’t want to do this,” Matt said gently, “but if this thing’s going to work, we’re going to have to talk about him eventually.”

Natasha sighed and knocked back her drink and got up. “You change. I’m getting a refill. And I’m not drinking alone.”

When Matt emerged from his room he found her sitting on the sofa, the bottle of bourbon and a second glass waiting for him on the coffee table. He poured himself a half-measure, just enough to be companionable, and joined her on the sofa, back against the arm, facing her.

“It’s okay,” he said, in the same tone of voice he used with his clients, terrified and exhausted from hours, maybe more, in a holding cell at the 15th Precinct, too uncertain what they should tell him, how much, if they should speak to him at all. “Let’s just start with how you met.”

Natasha took a fortifying sip of her drink and nodded. She didn’t want to do this, Matt could tell, didn’t want to be on this side of the questions, didn’t want him to know how far Clint had fallen. But Matt was right and she knew it. This wasn’t going to work any other way.

“Thirteen years ago, the KGB sent me to Budapest to take out a high-ranking CIA asset in the Hungarian intelligence service. Didn’t realize till I got there that it was a trap, that SHIELD had sent him there to take _me_ out. Long story short, things got messy, we ended up in a warehouse surrounded by Hungarian state police with KGB commandos on the way and a SHIELD helicopter overhead and he said, ‘Look, my ride’s not going to be around much longer, so there’s three ways this could go. One: I could kill you and complete my mission. Two: You could kill me and find out what the KGB will do to you when they learn you got caught this easy. Or three: You can come with me, tell SHIELD everything you know, and work for us. I vote three.’”

“Just like that?” Matt asked skeptically. “You went with him?”

She shrugged. “I’d gone on enough missions in the West by then to understand that the Soviet system was a farce. I wasn’t in love with capitalism, either, but democracy—that part was appealing. I guess I just realized he offered me a chance to serve a better master and I decided to take it.”

“You don’t strike me as a particularly ideological person,” Matt said. “What’s the real reason?”

Natasha laughed softly. “What’d my heartbeat tell you?”

It was Matt’s turn to laugh. “That it was personal.”

She nodded and shifted her weight on the sofa, drawing her knee up protectively in front of her. She did that often, he’d noticed—turtling up whenever she talked about herself.

“He’d read my file, of course. He knew what I’d done—things I didn’t think anyone outside of the Red Room knew. Mistakes. Bad calls. Knew about the hospital—” she shook her head and set her jaw. “Anyway, he convinced me that if I came over to SHIELD, I’d have a chance to make amends, to balance my ledger. I wasn’t sure how much I believed it, to be honest, but he said something that made me believe _he_ did, and I guess that was enough.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I’m actually not a very nice guy when you get right down to it, but I’ve got a baby girl coming in a few months, and I have to believe that the world I’m bringing her into is the kind of place where people don’t give up on each other. So I’m starting with you.’” A tiny shrug, so small Matt nearly missed it, and then: “I’m trained to resist almost any kind of coercion you can imagine, but I was just—so _tired_ by then, you know? I was so tired.”

_You ever been tired, Red?_

He’d found the Punisher lying against a gravestone in Green-Wood Cemetery with the cops closing in, bloody and broken and too badly beat to escape. Not the Punisher anymore, then—just Frank Castle, slowly surrendering to the inevitable, the failed mission, the unavenged family, life in a box with no chance for parole.

Matt nodded. “Yeah.”

“No one had ever talked to me like that and meant it. I mean, I knew how to make people like me, even fall in love with me, but it was never me they saw—just my cover,” she said. “Clint saw me.”

“And he decided you were worth saving.”

“I’ve known Lila since she was three months old,” Natasha said. “Clint might have been the first person who ever believed in me, but Lila was the first person who ever loved me. And that means something. That matters.”

“It does.”

“I’m so angry at him, Matt,” she said, suddenly pounding the sofa cushion. “He can’t give up now. He can’t. Or what’s it all for?”

*******

The next day Matt packed his gym bag and took the train back out to Red Hook. Kominsky’s wasn’t crowded—just a couple of guys in the ring and one skipping rope in the back corner, the slap of the cord throwing the gym into sharp relief. Rogers was working a heavy bag on the side wall, a row of spare bags lined up against the cinderblock in case he broke another one.

“Wasn’t expecting to see you again,” he commented between punches as Matt dropped his duffel in front of the next bag and began to wrap his hands.

“You never told me not to come back,” Matt said, folding his sunglasses and placing them carefully on top of his bag.

“It’s a free country.”

“So far,” Matt said, warming up with a few light hits.

“If you’ve come to revisit _that_ conversation, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”

“I’m not,” Matt said. “You talked to Clint Barton recently?”

Rogers paused as he hung a new bag on the hook. “No,” he said finally.

“But you know what he’s doing,” Matt said. “You know what he’s become.”

“Clint’s a wounded animal right now,” Rogers said. “He won’t let anyone near him he can’t trust. And right now, that’s a list of one.”

“Help anyway,” Matt said, hitting the bag hard. “Help _her_.”

“Ever occur to you that she doesn’t want my help?” Rogers asked. “That she blames me for what happened to him?”

“She tell you that?”

Steve drove his fist through the fresh bag. “She didn’t have to.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading this far! Questions? Feedback? Shoot me a note in the comments!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt and Natasha grow closer as Clint begins to close in.

Natasha grew short-tempered, antsy. Her morning runs grew longer and, judging from how breathless she was when she returned, faster. He started to come home to her doing pushups and squats, obsessively cleaning her pistols and sharpening her knives.

“Have you ever tried meditation?” Matt asked. “I could teach you.”

“Nobody wants to be alone with my brain,” Natasha said wryly. “Least of all me.”

“Fair enough,” Matt said, a different idea forming in his mind. “Why don’t you come out with me tonight, then?” he asked. “See how we street heroes get it done.”

She laughed softly, then turned back to her computer for a moment. It was clear whatever message she was waiting for hadn’t arrived yet. “All right,” she said, her voice warming to the idea. “What the hell.”

That night she watched him take down a car thief, beat a would-be rapist unconscious, and frighten a dirty cop trying to extort the shopkeepers on his beat into retirement. She stayed out of the way—the last thing either one of them needed was for word to get back to Fisk that Daredevil was working with Black Widow now—but she earned her keep by acting as his spotter, alerting him to approaching reinforcements, cops, innocent bystanders, with whispers only he could hear from the rooftop above.

He was showing off for her, he realized as he backflipped off a fire escape into an alley to cut off the dirty cop, the angry old need to prove himself to others bubbling up in a way that it hadn’t since his freshman year of college. He wanted her to see for herself how strong he was, how quick he was, how smart he was. He wanted her to see for herself how good he was in a fight, how well he could hold his own, how much she could count on him.

When they got home, a few hours before dawn, her breath was light and fast with exhilaration, and Matt stifled a brief sudden urge to kiss her. _It’s just the adrenaline_ , he told himself.

“Not bad for an amateur,” she said, squeezing his shoulder, her hand lingering a fraction too long. “If you ever get an itch to travel, you should call us. We could use someone like you.”

*******

Natasha began accompanying him on his rounds a few nights a week—just shadowing him, but staying close enough to get the lay of the land. Gradually, she began to learn the contours of each gang’s territory—their terrain, their resources, their weak spots. That night club where the Carbones ran their illegal card games, that laundromat where Bushmaster poetically hid all his dirty cash in empty detergent boxes in the basement downstairs, that taxi garage through which the Russians moved drugs all over the city.

Fisk’s genius, Matt explained, was that aside from about a dozen enforcers on his payroll, he had no gang of his own. What he had, rather, was money: money to buy off cops and politicians and the Port Authority, money to loan at exorbitant rates to the drug cartels and human traffickers, money to purchase safehouses and warehouses and stash houses, money to buy up and resell as many guns as Turk could get him, money to buy loyalty and deference and power.

“You weren’t kidding when you said New York was a target-rich environment,” Natasha said grimly, peering over a roof at the chop shop where the last survivors of the Kitchen Irish were making a tidy profit selling stolen car parts to the Canadians. “How can we possibly guess who Clint will go for first?”

“I don’t know,” Matt said, “but no matter who he starts with, the city’s going to pay for it too. Can you see the community garden down that way?” He pointed down the block and across the street to what used to be a vacant lot. “There’s six of them in Irish territory, all run by Finn Cooley’s widow. These gardens provide the only fresh vegetables that most of the people in the neighborhood can afford.” He pointed north. “The Jamaicans run half the soup kitchens in Harlem. The Carbones sponsor free clinics throughout the South Bronx, and on and on and on. And the man bankrolling it all is Wilson Fisk.”

“Fisk gave every gang a human shield,” Natasha said wonderingly. “I have to admit, I kind of admire him for that.”

“I thought it was his way of preventing me from going back on our deal,” Matt said. “And it worked. But it looks like he had a much longer game in mind. I have every expectation that when Fisk declares his candidacy, every one of these charities is going to come forward with the name of their benefactor.”

“Jesus.”

“He’s not stupid, Natasha,” Matt said. “Underestimate him at your own risk.”

“I’m starting to understand.”

“I know Steve says he’s out of the game, but I really think we could use him on our side when this goes down.”

“There’s a lot of people I wish we still had on our side, Matt,” Natasha said. “We just have to move on with what we’ve got.”

*******

One evening he came home from work earlier than usual to the sound of Tchaikovsky coming from his stereo. He paused at the door, then opened it as quietly as he could. The furniture had all been pushed to the edges of the room, his carpet carefully rolled away.

There, in the center of his apartment, Natasha was dancing—in toe shoes, if he was interpreting the sound of her steps correctly.

He had a vague memory of what ballet looked like—his third-grade class had been dragged to Swan Lake for a field trip—but he really hadn’t experienced it much since then. Elektra had some training, true, but it was nothing like what was unfolding before him now.

There was a pure loveliness to her movements, to the delicate swishes of air rippling around her and graceful flow of her arms. He was fairly certain she had not brought a single skirt with her, but her movements gave the impression of one now, swirling and fluttering around her ankles, a sweetly seductive suggestion of fabric to be lifted, of legs to be revealed.

A brief skip of her heart told him she had noticed him, but she kept dancing anyway, her breath heightened but steady as she twirled about the apartment. He was glad; he didn’t want to interrupt her. He could barely breathe from the beauty of it all.

When the solo ended, she padded over to the stereo to turn it off.

“I’ll move the furniture back,” she said, all business again. “I lost track of time.”

“No—” Matt said, feeling an unexpected bubble of emotion pressing against the back of his throat. _Don’t stop_. Instead he swallowed and managed to say: “No worries.”

“What did that—what was that like for you?” she asked. “I’m sorry, was that a rude question?”

“No. It’s not rude,” Matt said. “It was—” _It was the most beautiful thing I’ve experienced since the world ended_. “It seemed very graceful. The air currents—” he made a slow undulating motion with his hands. “I don’t see that often.”

“Do you think of it as sight, then? What you do?”

“I don’t think visually anymore,” he said. “But the shorthand’s useful.”

Natasha hummed briefly. “What do you think of it as, then?”

“Something more,” he said. “Something better.” 

“You don’t miss it then?”

“I didn’t say that,” Matt said. “There are things I wish I could see again. I’ve got some photographs of my dad that are nothing but rectangles to me. The sky—clouds, stars, moon—all of that’s gone now. And colors—I think I remember them, but I don’t know. And being blind’s still a pain in the ass sometimes, even being able to do everything else I can do.” He shrugged. “But I don’t think I’d trade what I have now to get it all back.”

“I wonder if we’ll feel the same way about all this one day, too,” Natasha said. “That in 50 or 100 years, we’ll have rebuilt the world better than it would have been if this had never happened, that in the grand scheme of things, we’ll look back on this time and think it was terrible but it made us stronger, that it forced us to solve problems we never could have solved otherwise. Climate change, nuclear weapons, antibiotic overuse—”

“That all the suffering was worth something?” Matt said. “That’s very Catholic of you.”

Natasha huffed a quiet laugh. “I don’t know if I’d go that far. But I’d like to believe—maybe I _have_ to believe—that something good will come out of all this.”

“Maybe it will,” Matt said. “But if it does, it won’t be Thanos who was responsible. It’ll be us.”

*******

He woke up with a pounding headache, his left leg ablaze with pain. The wound itself throbbed—it was bandaged, he could tell, and he detected the distinctive itch of sutures.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Natasha said, swimming into focus on his left side. “It’s eleven a.m. and Theo keeps calling,” she said, pushing his phone into his hand. “Please put the poor guy out of his misery.”

It began to come back: The gunshot in the meat of his left calf, a lucky graze along a vulnerable part of his armor just above his boot. It should have been an easy fight—just a couple of thugs robbing a liquor store—but he was exhausted and sloppy and didn’t detect the pistol in time. It was just a flesh wound, too, but it was a messy one, and he was pretty sure the bullet had nicked bone, too. He remembered staggering back to his roof, falling down the stairs, hitting his head on the banister.

Matt grunted and moved the phone unsteadily up to his mouth so he could dictate a text.

_Made a mistake last night. Got hurt. I’ll be fine. Tell my appointments I’ll reschedule tomorrow._

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Natasha said gently.

Matt sighed and amended, _I mean Monday. Sorry to worry you._

“You’re not going to be walking very far by Monday,” Natasha said.

He flexed his toes experimentally, tried not to visibly wince when the pain went searing up to his knee. “I heal fast.”

“Matt.”

“If you think you’re the first woman to lecture me about my risk-taking, you’re sorely mistaken.”

“Judging from the scars you’re covered in, I don’t doubt that.”

Matt’s hand flew to his chest and he registered for the first time that he was naked save for his underwear. He felt an embarrassed flush spread through his body. “I’m really sorry you had to do this.”

“I’ve seen worse,” Natasha said, wiggling his unhurt foot. “But you’re welcome.”

Just then, his phone vibrated with a reply from Theo, a string of expletives rendered so ridiculous by the computerized voice of his phone’s screen reader that neither one of them could keep from laughing.

Then: _Dammit Matt, you promised to be careful._

“Listen to your friend, huh?” Natasha said, with an urgency Matt could tell surprised them both.

“Why, Miss Romanoff,” Matt said wryly, letting the phone fall back on the bed. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were worried about me.”

“Be more careful,” she said gruffly, failing to mask the anxious skitter of her heart. “And I won’t have to worry so much.”

*******

After a day of rest and meditation, Matt was able to limp unassisted to the bathroom to wash up and change into fresh clothes, and then to the sofa, where Natasha helped him prop his hurt leg up onto a pillow on the coffee table. She nestled an ice pack around his wound and pushed a box of lukewarm pad thai and a pair of chopsticks into his hands.

“You seem like the kind of person who would sigh heavily and ask for chopsticks if I dared hand you a fork, so,” she said, taking the seat next to him and tucking into some curry.

“Au contraire,” Matt said mildly, taking a tentative mouthful, waiting to see how his stomach would accept it. It responded with raging hunger, so he began to dig in in earnest. “I’m usually quite polite about it.”

Natasha laughed softly. “You must get tired of people underestimating you, though.”

“You know, everyone thinks they’re the first person in the world to make that observation,” he said, though not unkindly.

Natasha opened her mouth, then closed it again. Then, “You’re right. That was condescending. I’m sorry.”

“Accepted,” Matt said. “Now may I ask _you_ something?”

“Uh-oh,” Natasha said, punctuating the word with a soft, mock-embarrassed laugh. “34C, yes, I’m a natural redhead, and no, I never slept with Steve Rogers. Am I close?”

Matt snorted. “I was going to ask about Rogers, but not that.”

“Then what?”

“Do you blame him for what happened to Barton?”

Natasha hummed and stood. “This requires alcohol,” she said, going into the kitchen. “Since you refuse anything stronger than aspirin, can I convince you to at least treat yourself to a medicinal scotch?”

“Sure.”

“So, the thing with Steve is that he stopped trusting himself after Wakanda,” Natasha said when she handed him his drink. “He made a tactical decision based on his feelings and he believes it cost us the war.”

“Was he right?” Matt asked. “News was hard to come by at the time.”

“I don’t know. When it became clear what Thanos was planning to do, Vision asked Wanda to destroy the Mind Stone in order to keep it from him. He knew it would have been suicide—we all did—and Wanda refused, of course, because she loved him. But she wasn’t stupid, either—she was the only one in the world with the power to destroy it and I think if Steve had backed Vision up, she would have done it,” Natasha said. “But Steve wouldn’t. Said we weren’t in the business of trading lives, no sacrificial lambs, and all that—which was pretty rich coming from him. He decided we should go to Wakanda instead, where they might be able to destroy the thing without killing Vision—and without having to make Wanda have to do it.” She swirled her drink in her glass. “But it took too long. Thanos got there first. And then all we had left was…”

“Principle and ashes.”

“Steve’s greatest strength was always his greatest weakness: He always believed that if enough good people stood together against evil, we would always win,” Natasha said. “He couldn’t bring himself to compromise, and the universe paid the price. And he blames himself. For Barton. For Bucky. For everything.”

“Bucky?”

“Steve adored Peggy Carter but Bucky was the love of his life,” Natasha said. “They’d hoped that once Bucky had recovered from his Hydra programming—”

“I see.”

“It’s the second time Steve couldn’t save him,” Natasha said. “I think it broke him.”

“That explains why he blames himself, but it didn’t answer my question,” Matt said gently. “Do _you_ blame him?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes, sometimes not,” she said after a long minute. “I think mostly I just blame myself.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t do everything I could have,” she said simply. “I should have pushed back when I thought he was making the wrong call. I should have made him change his mind. I can’t help but wonder if we’d destroyed the Mind Stone in time, Strange might never have felt like he needed to give away the Time Stone in the first place. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything, but maybe it would have. But now I’ll never know.”

“You really thought you could have made Steve Rogers change his mind?”

“You can take the girl out of the Red Room but you can’t take the Red Room out of the girl,” Natasha said, more blithely than he knew she felt. “I can make _anyone_ change their mind.”

“Why’d you let him walk away, then?”

“I haven’t,” she said, and he was startled to realize she was lying—or at least that what she was saying was perhaps more hope than fact. “I’m letting him heal.”

“You really do blame him,” Matt said, the realization suddenly snapping into focus. “You don’t want to, but you do.”

Natasha didn’t reply, just drew her knees in more tightly and turned her face toward the window, concentrating intently on her drink.

Outside, there was a distant scuffle, a scream, a shout, another shout, more voices, more screaming. There was a long silence. There was a siren. Natasha gave no indication that she’d been able to hear any of it. His ankle throbbed.

“So many things have broken that I never thought could,” Matt said finally. “All we can hope to do is patch things up as best we can and pray nothing really bad happens until we’re strong enough to respond to it.”

Natasha laughed softly. “You really pray?”

“I do,” Matt said. “I don’t go to church for fun.”

“I thought it might have had to do with Sister Maggie.”

“I was a Catholic long before I knew she was my mother.”

“I don’t know what I am,” Natasha said. “Religion’s never been my thing, even though I _know_ gods exist. But maybe that’s the problem: Knowledge isn’t belief, is it.”

“What _do_ you believe in?”

Natasha made a low noise that could have been either a laugh or a sob. “I believe people are worth saving,” she said finally, her voice rough with a feeling Matt couldn’t quite identify. “I believe you have to keep doing whatever you can, until the end.”

“Hey,” Matt said, moving his arm around her shoulders and drawing her in close. “I get it.”

After only the briefest startle, she relaxed into his body, let her head fall against his shoulder. Then her body shuddered with a soft sob and he felt his sleeve grow damp with her tears. Her crying was soft, frustrated. She had been trying to hold the world together for the better part of a year, Matt realized, and this was probably the first time since Thanos that she’d allowed herself to let go.

He reached up to stroke her hair, trying not to pay so much attention to how nice it smelled—to how there was a sweetness, a warmth beneath the shampoo that he recognized as uniquely hers, black tea and raspberries and smoke—and when she curled her fingers into the cotton of his t-shirt, he bent down to kiss the top of her head.

She stretched her arm around his chest. He pulled her into a proper hug, then and she held him tight, her face buried into the curve of his neck, her breath stuttering with grief.

“It’s okay,” Matt said softly. “I’ve got you.”

He held her until the storm passed and when her grip on him began to slack, he responded in kind until she sat back and laughed softly, wiping her eyes.

“Don’t tell anyone I did that,” she warned him.

“Did what?” Matt asked, ruffling her hair.

“Thanks,” she said, then reached up to touch Matt’s cheek. She was holding her breath, Matt noticed, and then suddenly she was kissing him, slow and sweet, and God, it had been so long since anyone had touched him that way, and he responded in kind, cupping the back of her neck, running his hand up and down her arm.

“Tell me to stop and I will,” she murmured against his lips.

“Don’t stop,” Matt said, and pushed her teeth apart with his tongue.

He eased his foot off the coffee table and she climbed onto his lap, straddling him with her legs tucked up beneath her, her breasts pressed against his chest. She wrapped her arms around his neck as they kissed and he cupped her ass in his hands and hauled her closer, felt her nipples harden against him as his cock hardened against her body in turn.

He could hardly breathe and she couldn’t either, their need was so urgent. They kissed and nibbled each other’s lips, ears, necks; they curled their fingers into each other’s hair, clothes, muscle. They pulled each other’s shirts off; he reached around and unhooked her bra, gently freeing her breasts from each cup in turn.

He gently leaned her back, supporting her in his arms, and took her left nipple in his mouth, teasing it lightly with his teeth and tongue, smiling as she let out a happy, breathy little sigh. After a few minutes he shifted so he could reach the other breast, and his ankle hurt but he ignored it; the only thing that mattered was Natasha’s breath, the warmth of her body, the fine sheen of sweat that had broken across her skin.

She pulled herself forward with a happy little hum to kiss him hard, rocking her hips against him, rubbing herself against his cock. She was damp already; her smell was heady and tangy and rich, and he wasn’t far behind.

“We have to do something about those leggings,” he murmured, tugging at her waistband.

She slid off his lap and took his hand. “Come with me.”

She led him into the bedroom and helped him out of his pajama pants, his underwear, gently fondling his cock, his balls as she pulled the elastic down.

“Sit,” she prompted gently, and he did. She spread his legs apart and put his hands on the waistband of her leggings; she played with his hair as he undressed her, dipping down to kiss him or nibble on his ear whenever she needed to step out of a garment.

“Scoot back,” she said. “Lie down. Your foot must be killing you.”

It was, but he didn’t care. “I’ll live.”

She snorted inelegantly and he laughed. “Humor me,” she said, and he did. He smiled with amusement as she broke off to prop his leg up on a pillow and, he thought, briefly check his bandages before climbing onto him.

She straddled him again, her sex pushed hard against the base of his cock, and began to roll her hips in slow, deep strokes along the underside of his shaft. He reached up to cup her breasts, tracing his thumbs around her nipples, delighting as they tightened beneath his touch, as her breath began to catch and stumble in her chest.

“You got a condom or something?” she asked, her voice low and a little hoarse, and yes, yes he did.

He got the condom and the lube and she applied both, then repositioned herself so she could guide him inside.

“You good?” he asked as she shifted to find her fit, his fingers touching her everywhere he could reach as his sense of her shape blurred away.

“Very good,” she said, and they began to move.

He rested his hands on her hips and began to thrust. He couldn’t contribute as much as usual, pushing only with his right foot, but after a few moments it didn’t matter because nothing mattered except the flooding sensation of their bodies coming together; he fed his thumb carefully between the lips of her labia to stroke her clit and was rewarded with a long, jagged moan.

They began to move faster, push harder, their breath coming sharp and fast, feathered with moans and soft, encouraging expletives; Natasha had a filthy mouth and Matt loved it, her cursing in English and Russian, and God, he wanted to touch her everywhere, feel the sweat slick against her skin and the soft quick throbs of her pulse beneath; she was close, he could tell, and so was he; and then suddenly he was there and she was there and he was flooding into her and she was crying out with release.

She collapsed against his chest and they rode out the aftershocks together, grinning as their bodies twitched and shivered against one another. Finally she kissed his chest and rolled off of him, pulling the condom away and tying it off before kissing his mouth and going to the bathroom.

He lay there in a pleasant, dozing buzz until she came back, pushed a cold glass of water and two aspirins into his hand and helped him sit up against the headboard. “You’ll thank me in the morning,” she said wryly, and he didn’t disagree.

“That was nice, by the way,” he said, swallowing the pills. “I needed that.”

“We both did,” she said.

“You could sleep here tonight,” he said. “If you want to.”

*******

Now, when Matt came home from his rounds, Natasha was waiting for him in bed. Sometimes asleep, sometimes not. He loved it. Not her, not yet—though he thought maybe one day he could—but the warmth and the touch and the connection—he loved it. He needed it now more than ever. Maybe he’d always needed it.

Maybe Karen was right. He couldn’t do it alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feed me delicious comments! :D


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one said not giving up on someone was easy.

Rhodes checked in after almost two weeks of silence. He’d been in upper Michigan, investigating the murder of a militia leader and three of his lieutenants in what police were calling a bear attack. “I might have something.”

“Is he close?” Natasha asked, the usual impossible question.

“No telling,” Rhodes said. “He’s zigging and zagging. I’m on my way to Toronto tonight to investigate a new lead. If it’s legit, it could be a matter of days. Hours, even.”

“We should bring law enforcement in on this sooner rather than later,” Matt warned. “The gangs are still holding a whole lot of this city together. If we can’t stop him in time, a lot of dominoes are going to start falling very quickly.”

“Yeah, and whose fault is that?” Rhodes asked sharply.

“I don’t know, Colonel. Maybe if you guys had thought to invite the rest of us to your little party in Wakanda it might have ended differently.”

“Boys, enough!” Natasha intervened. “This is the hand we’ve been dealt. Rhodey, stay close to Clint. If you can catch up to him, all the better—we’ll come to you. Matt, if we bring law enforcement in now, the police are only going to waste resources they don’t have on a task force to take down a man they can’t possibly outgun. So they stay in the dark for now, okay?”

Just then, his phone vibrated with an incoming call, its computerized voice identifying the caller for all hear: _Wilson Fisk_ , _Wilson Fisk_ , _Wilson Fisk_.

Matt held up a warning finger to Nat and the pulsing column of energy from which Rhodey’s voice emanated and put the phone on speaker. “Hello, Mr. Fisk.”

“Mr. Murdock. I hope I haven’t called at an inconvenient time.”

“I’ve got a few minutes.”

“Good. I wanted to apprise you, as a courtesy, of my intention to run for mayor,” Fisk said. “Although I suspect you already know about that.”

“I’ve heard rumors.”

“Indeed. I’m the one who started them,” he said, and Matt wanted to punch the smug little smile he was convinced Fisk was making off his face forever. “I’ll be filing the paperwork tomorrow and will make a formal announcement at the Presidential Hotel ballroom on Friday evening.”

“I hope you’re not calling to ask for my endorsement,” Matt said.

“I wouldn’t dream of troubling your conscience any further,” Fisk said expansively. “But since I’ve no doubt you’ll find some way to sneak into the party, I’d like to spare you the trouble and offer you an invitation myself. Bring a guest, if you’d like. Wear a tux instead of that ridiculous costume, do your eavesdropping, and have a nice dinner on me. I might even leave some evidence lying around that could net you a conviction or two—though no one who really matters to me, of course. What do you say?”

“I’d say you’re trying to change the deal,” Matt said mildly. “I’d say you want me to be seen there. I’d say you want the world to know you own me. I’d say if I happen to have other plans, I’m going to see my name—both of them—on the front page of the Bulletin the next day.”

Fisk laughed softly. “I’ll see you on Friday, then.”

Natasha let out an ominous hum when Matt ended the call.

“I guess we know where he’s headed next,” Rhodey said. “I’m on my way.”

*******

“Jesus,” Natasha breathed, scanning the ballroom. They’d arrived fairly early to scout the place out, but the ballroom was already teeming festively with the city’s rich and powerful—clearly Fisk had made courtesy calls to more than just Matt. “It’s like Thanos never existed.”

“I don’t know about that,” Matt said. “This is a lot of drunk people to have before the hors d’oeuvres even come out, open bar or not.”

“Good,” Natasha said, sweeping two champagne glasses from a passing tray and handing one to Matt. “Sloppy people are less likely to make the connection between Ronin and Clint. That works for us.”

“Can you drink in that thing?” Matt asked as Natasha took a sip. Her face buzzed faintly from the photostatic veil she wore over it; in order to make sure she didn’t come to the party wearing a face anyone there knew, it had been programmed to create a composite from an old database of female SHIELD employees.

“I can do anything in it,” she said, pitching her voice low with mock seduction. “A Widow always knows how to dress to impress.” She was kitted out in full tactical formalwear: a flowing dress carefully cut for maximum range of motion, some kind of kevlar-backed catsuit with discreet pistol and baton holsters to wear beneath it, and a pair of diamond-encrusted Widow’s Bite bracelets that Tony had given her for Christmas a few years before.

Matt, for his part, couldn’t very well fit his armor under his tux, so he was wearing a lightweight kevlar vest from Natasha’s SHIELD stash and had a cane he could break into billy clubs if he had to. It would have to do. They both wore discreet communicators; tiny auditory conductors behind their right ears that didn’t interfere with Matt’s echolocation. And they had Rhodey, parked in full War Machine gear on the roof of the building across the street, keeping an eye out for Clint’s approach.

Assuming he wasn’t already in the building. If he was, well, Matt and Natasha were on their own.

Matt drank two sips of champagne, then handed the glass to Natasha and took her elbow. They made a lazy circuit around the room, Matt quietly pointing out the voices he recognized to her—there were plenty of reporters, of course, but also the acting police commissioner, the borough president, D.A. Tower, a roster of judges so long that made Matt wonder if there were any in the city who’d had the balls to refuse to come. But Fisk was apparently unconcerned about the optics of his associations—Matt recognized Rosalie Carbone and Anibal Izqueda and Sherry Yang, too.

“You’re turning heads,” Matt murmured into her ear as they glided past the bandstand toward the bar.

“Fisk wanted you to be seen,” she murmured back, planting a quick, faintly buzzing kiss on his jaw.

Matt didn’t have the heart to point out that the cane and glasses usually took care of that; it was nice to imagine living in a world where it was just the pretty girl on his arm that made people look. He decided to let them both have it.

Someone recognized Matt; an assistant state’s attorney he’d gone to Columbia with. Natasha introduced herself as Natalie Rushman, a project manager with Stark Industries—“Gosh, no, I’ve never met Iron Man. I wish!”—and proceeded to charm the pants off the ASA and his wife so effectively that five minutes later, she and Matt walked away with the names of three judges that don’t-tell-anyone-but-I-think-they’re-all-on-Fisk’s-payroll.

“God, you’re good,” Matt said.

“He’s on Fisk’s payroll too, by the way,” Natasha murmured, taking a fake sip of champagne. “There’s no way he could have known that if he wasn’t. One, maybe. Not three.”

“Duly noted.”

“Come on,” Natasha said, setting the untouched champagne down and taking his hand. “Let’s dance. I want to get a better look at the sightlines around the room.”

“Do we have to?”

“No, but it’s the most efficient way to do it,” Natasha said. “Come on, it’s a slow song. I’ll show you what to do. It’ll be totally painless, I promise.”

Matt sighed and folded his cane. “Lead the way, my dear.”

She laughed and led him out to the dance floor. It was quieter out here; it was hard to focus in big crowds, and he had to admit that it was nice to get a relative break from the hubbub.

“So, left hand like this,” she said, taking it in her right and stepping in close to his body, “and right hand around my waist, like this.”

“I know how to dance,” Matt said tartly. “I just don’t _like_ to.”

“Why not?”

“Look around.”

“Oh,” Natasha said after a startled minute, and though her voice was neutral Matt could hear the anxiety in her heartbeat as she glanced around and realized how many people were looking at them. Staring, even. “Why didn’t you just say something?”

“Mission comes first,” Matt said, then let his fingers drift down to the top curve of her ass. “And, you know. That’s nice, too.”

She laughed a little, then tugged at his collar. “You should have told me, dummy.”

“Look, I’m a self-flagellating idiot with no capacity for self-care,” Matt said. “So let’s just get it over with. You do your recon, I’ll come indecently close to molesting you in public, and we’ll call it even.”

_You know I can hear everything you say, right?_ Rhodey sighed.

Natasha laughed and guided them around, quietly narrating for both Matt and Rhodey’s benefit. “There’s a mezzanine along the south wall, but the stairwell is blocked off. I don’t see Fisk but I see security, and they’re not all looking down at the party, so I’m guessing that’s the green room.”

Matt focused on the mezzanine, and sure enough, he could hear Fisk softly talking about advertising buys with someone who was probably his campaign manager.

“Barton likes high places, right?” Matt said. “That’s where he’ll go.”

“Yep,” Natasha said, her voice dropping ominously. “We’ll need to find a way up there.”

“There’s got to be a service stair,” Matt said, then pulled up short as his ears snagged on a familiar sound in the wrong place. A faint buzz, like Natasha’s mask, but behind him and to the left, near the hallway to the restrooms.

“What’s wrong?” Natasha asked as Matt broke off the dance and unfolded his cane.

“Nothing, I hope,” Matt said. “Stay here and keep watch. I’ll go check it out.”

“Matthew.”

“It’s fine. Just sit tight. Go charm some more incriminating evidence out of some tipsy public officials.”

People usually gave the cane a wide berth and tonight was no different; it made cutting through a crowd easy but it wasn’t inconspicuous either, and when he reached the hallway, it was empty.

“Going dark for a few minutes,” Matt said softly. He thumbed off his communicator before Rhodes or Nat could object, and tapped his way along the hallway, touching the signs by each door: _Ladies_ , _Men_ , _Do Not Enter_. He placed his hand on the knob to the third door, gave it a test. It turned. He pushed his way in and the buzzing flooded his ears, bouncing off the metal shelves and tile floor of a utility closet. Beneath the stench of bleach and floor cleaner, he detected a familiar smell: Chalk.

“Rogers.”

“You’re good,” Rogers said.

“You keep saying that,” Matt said. “Maybe one day you’ll stop sounding so surprised about it.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“I figured it had to be either you or Barton,” Matt said. “And you didn’t try to attack me, so.”

“So.”

“Invited guests don’t usually wear photostatic veils to parties, so what’s your game?” Matt asked.

“Heard my friends needed me,” Steve said. “Thought I’d see what I could do.”

“Without them knowing,” Matt said.

“Safer that way,” Rogers said. “Like I said, Clint’s a wounded animal. The minute he feels trapped—”

“You mean, the minute you fuck up and spook him?” Matt asked, and Rogers shifted his weight uneasily. “Look, you can’t have it both ways. If you want in, then you have to be all the way in. Otherwise go home and let us handle this.”

Rogers made a chagrined laughing noise and shook his head.

“What’s so funny?” Matt asked.

“You remind me of someone.”

“Who?”

“Me.”

“Well, listen to yourself, then,” Matt said. “Look, the clock’s ticking. Can we postpone the pep talk till after we stop your buddy from slaughtering half the people at this party?”

Rogers paused for a too-long minute, his hands curling into fists, and nodded.

“Attaboy,” Matt said, squeezing his arm. Cheap wool, kevlar-lined. He patted Rogers’ chest and found a small lapel pin. Brushed his fingers over it and recognized the logo for Hammer Security. “Are you dressed as protection detail?”

“Yeah,” Rogers said, and the brief startle in his heartbeat told Matt that he’d forgotten Matt’s blindness for a moment. “Only way a guy as big as me can get close without standing out.”

“Good,” Matt said, and then tapped the dot behind his ear. “I’m back,” he said. “And I’ve got company. Nat, don’t react.”

_I never react._

Matt peeled the dot from behind his ear and held it out toward Rogers’ face, nodding.

Rogers nodded and leaned toward the dot. “Hey, guys.”

_About goddamn time you got your head out of your ass_ , Rhodey said.

_Where the hell are you?_ Nat asked, her voice soft but urgent.

“Broom closet next to the men’s room,” Matt said. “There’s room for one more.”

Natasha sighed heavily. _On my way._

“Can you stand between me and the door?” Steve asked. “She sounds like she’s loaded for bear.”

“Do you blame her?”

Rogers hummed in agreement and crossed his arms. His heart was skipping anxiously and he was subtly shifting his weight back and forth. Whatever had broken between him and Natasha had run deeper than Natasha had let on.

When her soft knock came, Matt whispered “take off your mask” and then stepped back into an alcove that, from the smell, had recently housed a mop cart.

As he did, the faint buzzing vanished and the door opened. Natasha was holding her breath, then moved her hand to her left temple and the faint buzzing vanished from her face as well.

“Hi, Nat.”

“You fucking asshole,” Natasha said, then took two quick steps forward and somehow, though she was a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, managed to swallow him with a hug.

“I know I am,” Steve murmured. “I wasn’t there for you. I’m so sorry.”

“We never talked about it,” she said, stepping back but not breaking her attention on Steve’s face. “We should have. We need to.”

“I know. We will.”

Natasha thumbed a tear away. “You better not fucking flake again, Steve.”

“I won’t,” Steve said, his heart simultaneously breaking and beating the truth. “I promise.”

_As touching as this reunion is, I’ve got eyes on Clint rappelling down the south side of the building. Tell me to grab him off the wire and I will._

“You can’t sneak up on him,” Steve said. “This place is huge. If he busts into a guest room to get away from you, we’ll lose him. Better if we clear the mezzanine and take him once he’s inside.”

_Roger that._

“So does that mean you’re back?” Natasha asked, switching her mask back on.

“Come on,” Steve said, toggling his own mask too. “We don’t have much time.”

*******

Accessing the mezzanine was laughably easy with Steve in tow: All it took was a quiet murmur to the man minding the rope at the foot of the stairs that Mr. Fisk had requested Mr. Murdock’s presence upstairs. They knew their approach would be blown when the rope-minder radioed the upstairs staff of Matt’s approach, but it couldn’t be helped. Clint would be there in minutes, maybe less.

“Mr. Murdock, I wasn’t expecting—” Fisk began, his voice both gracious and warning. He wasn’t alone; there were two security guards and about five or six VIPs—including Rosalie Carbone, Sherry Yang, and Anibal Izqueda.

Clint was about to hit the jackpot.

“You’re in danger,” Matt said briskly. “Go. All of you. Now.”

“What the hell, Fisk?” Rosalie Carbone snapped. “You gave us assurances.”

_He’s at the tenth floor_ , Rhodey said.

“The Avengers are saving your lives,” Natasha said in a voice that brooked no argument. Matt could tell from the shocked gasps alone that she and Steve had just switched their masks off. “I recommend you enjoy the irony from a safer distance.”

“Clear the mezzanine right now, dammit,” Steve barked at the nearest security guard, and this, finally, startled the guards into action. They rounded up the crime bosses with astonishing efficiency and were just hustling them into the private stairwell when Barton burst through the window. Matt threw his glasses and coat to the side and broke his cane into clubs as Rhodey dropped into the building through the shattered window and cut Barton’s rope with a quick burst of his repulsor beam.

“Clint,” Natasha said.

“Don’t make me hurt you, Nat,” Barton warned. His voice was grave but his heart was beating a panicked tattoo and, if Matt was guessing correctly, his hands were shaking.

“I don’t have a choice,” Natasha said, holding her hands out, palms up. “I can’t let you keep doing this.”

“ _We_ can’t let you keep doing this,” Rhodey corrected.

“Come with us,” Steve said. “We’ll figure it out.”

“I’m not going back to the RAFT,” Barton said, raising his sword. Raising it, but not swinging it. Yet.

Downstairs, Fisk’s campaign manager was calmly but urgently issuing evacuation orders to the partygoers—some bullshit about a piece of masonry falling off the roof and hitting the building to explain the crash, and fortunately almost everyone at the party was too drunk to question it. Matt prayed none of the reporters were planning to get entrepreneurial and try to sneak upstairs.

“So that’s your play?” Natasha was asking, her hands still out. “Take as many gangsters out as you can before one of them gets a lucky shot in? Before a cop takes you down? Before one of us has to?”

“My God, Natasha,” Barton said, his voice feathery with despair. “You know what I’ve done.”

“I have to believe this world is still the kind of place where people don’t give up on each other,” Natasha said softly. “You taught me that. I don’t care how broken things are. I’m not giving up on you.”

“Yeah? Where do I go from here?” Barton asked. “What does redemption look like for someone like me?”

“Like me,” Natasha said. “It looks like me.”

“You were a brainwashed child,” Barton said, shaking his head. “You didn’t have a choice.”

“I wasn’t like Bucky,” Natasha said, her words startling Rogers. “You think Budapest was the first chance I had to defect? I chose to stay with the KGB. I chose to make those kills. I chose to let that hospital burn. I had plenty of choices, Clint. I’m still paying for them. And so will you.”

“How?”

“Well, if your friends won’t turn over their evidence, the only thing anyone can arrest you for is breaking that window,” Matt said. “So you can waste the police’s time with that, or you can go with Natasha and dedicate your life to putting the world back together again. Your call.” 

Barton cocked his head toward Matt. “Who the hell is he?”

“Your lawyer,” Matt said. He turned his head toward the broken window, noting the approaching sirens beneath the rush of cold wind. “Cops are on their way.”

“Are we really not turning over evidence?” Steve asked.

“What evidence?” Rhodey asked. “Every one of these cases is closed. All I’ve got is crime scene photos, news reports, and hearsay to put them together. You really want me to convince the FBI to dedicate their already vastly inadequate resources to opening an investigation based on _that_ when we’ve already got the man in custody?”

“Less talking, more leaving, guys,” Matt said. “The cops are almost here.”

“Clint,” Natasha said, holding her hand out to him. “Please. Come with me, and we’ll figure it out. Don’t let your story end this way. Please.”

Barton lowered his sword but shook his head. “You can’t save me, Nat,” he said.

Matt sighed and winged one of his billy clubs at Barton’s temple, dropping him like a stone. “We don’t have time for this,” Matt said. “Let’s get out of here.”

*******

They made their way to the East Side heliport, where a Stark Industries chopper was gassed up and waiting to whisk them all upstate to the compound. The first thing Natasha did was inject Barton with a sedative, and the second thing she did was drop her high heels in the East River. For Matt’s part, it was his first time in a helicopter and, he vowed as he vomited into a waxed paper bag for the third time, his last.

“I’m never kissing you again,” Natasha sighed as Rogers handed him a bottle of water. She was sitting across from Matt and Rogers with Barton’s head in her lap. She had one hand draped protectively over his chest and was stroking his hair with the other.

“What are you going to do with him?” Matt asked.

“I don’t know,” Natasha admitted. “I’m really uncomfortable with the idea of the Avengers pulling rank for something this bad, but—”

“You’re a lawyer,” Rogers said. “What are our options?”

“What he’s done is indefensible,” Matt said bluntly. “But there’s a compelling national security argument to keep him in Avengers custody. I think we can all agree that the world is still one bad decision away from ending entirely, and it will be for a long time. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say skills like his, properly deployed, could help ensure the survival of the human race. And I agree with Natasha: I think he could come back from this.”

“So what, we just forgive and forget?” Rhodey asked skeptically. “He never sets foot in front of a judge?”

“I think you talk to him,” Matt said, trying to imagine what Foggy would do. “You talk to him and listen to him and keep talking to him and keep listening to him and get him a team of therapists and keep him on the shortest leash you can find and, maybe, just maybe, we can hold the world together long enough to rebuild.”

*******

“Sorry about the mess,” Natasha said, showing Matt into her room and kicking a pile of laundry away from the bed. Clint was tucked into a bed in a holding cell, sleeping off his sedative. He’d be out till morning, but Steve was going to stay in the brig with him, just in case. Rhodey had fallen asleep on the sofa in the family room, his beer forgotten after two sips.

“I didn’t notice,” Matt said, taking her hand and pulling her into a hug. “Hell of a day, huh?”

“Hell of a day,” she said, holding him tight.

“I hope you’re right about him,” Matt said.

“Me too,” she said, then she kissed him.

“I thought you said you were never going to do that again,” Matt said, smiling against her lips.

“A good mint can cover a multitude of sins.”

Matt laughed softly and kissed her again, his hands drifting around to her back to unzip her dress.

They undressed each other slowly, trading kisses and nuzzles, so tired they could barely stand, so raw-hearted that they could not bear another moment without each other’s touch. They kissed and undressed and caressed each other’s skin, pressing their bodies together for warmth, for comfort, for the feeling of their hearts beating against each other’s chests.

Matt kissed her breasts until her nipples grew hard, then guided her down onto the bed and gently parted her legs. He kissed the insides of her knees, her thighs, softly sucking kisses with just the barest hint of teeth, of darting tongue, enough to arouse but not to bruise, then pressed his mouth against her sex, the soft hair tickling his nose and filling it with the rich, sweet, smoky-tea scent that only he could detect beneath her sweat and tang.

He ran his tongue along her soft folds, gently circling her clit and sucking, licking and sucking until her breath began to catch and tumble, until her legs began to tremble and her fingers curled around his, her hips bucking beneath him needily, urgently, until her legs shook and her body shuddered and she let out a long, happy moan of release.

He remained there for a minute, so hard he could barely move, then gingerly climbed over her leg and lay beside her.

“Mmm,” Natasha said, kissing him as she reached down to take his cock in her hand. “Looks like you enjoyed that almost as much as I did.”

Matt laughed softly and tucked a stray curl behind her ear. “Almost.” 

She stroked him lazily until the echoes of her orgasm faded, then gently pushed him onto his back and straddled his legs. She cupped his balls as she took him into her mouth and began to suck.

He played with her hair, carding it through his fingers, delighting in the gentle spring of her curls as they passed across his hand. She could do things with her mouth he’d never heard of before, prompting and postponing his pleasure in turns, coaxing him toward release and then holding him there, just on the edge, just till he began to slip back before bringing him up again. His hips began to hitch; his need was yowling for more, more, more.

“I need—” Matt gasped. “Oh my God, please let me, I need to, please, please—”

She slid her mouth off and took him into her hand, delivering mercy swiftly and joyously with a sweet, breathy laugh as his pleasure surged through him, spilling over her hand and striping his belly.

“You’re amazing,” Matt sighed. Natasha kissed his hip and playfully wiped her sticky hand clean across his thigh before curling up beside him.

“You’re pretty amazing yourself,” Natasha said, nuzzling against his neck. “What you did today—”

“You did the hard work,” Matt said. “I just helped.”

“Matt,” she said seriously. “You helped me get my _family_ back. Almost nobody gets to say that anymore. And I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“You think Steve’s gonna stay?”

She nodded into his shoulder. “After tonight? Yeah. He’ll stay.”

“And Clint?”

“We’ll do everything we can, but you might have to pray for that one,” she said, her voice thickening with sleep.

“I will.”

She hummed in acknowledgment and let her head fall against her shoulder. She was asleep within minutes; Matt was not far behind.

In the morning, they rose early. Natasha drove him back to the city to collect her things, packing quickly so Natasha could get back to the compound before Clint woke. She didn’t have much. An hour later, her SUV was loaded and nothing of her was left behind but the lingering scent of her perfume, faintly blending with Karen’s on the second pillow on his bed.

“I’m gonna miss this place,” Natasha said, kissing him one last time.

“It’s okay,” Matt said, clasping his hands on her arms and touching his forehead to hers. “Go. The world needs you.”

“And New York needs you,” she said.

“Maybe once things calm down, if things _ever_ calm down—”

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe then.”

*******

Two weeks later, Theo walked into Matt’s office during a brief break between clients.

“Come out here,” he said. “Listen to the news.”

Matt followed Theo into the butcher shop and leaned against the wall as Theo turned up the volume on the TV.

“New York One has learned that mayoral candidate Wilson Fisk has been arrested on aggravated domestic terrorism charges,” the announcer said.

Apparently, the FBI had uncovered a plot by a white supremacist gang in Long Island to attack an unspecified government building, and when they traced the stockpiled guns, they discovered that they’d been purchased from the Dogs of Hell, who’d in turn bought them from Turk Barrett using money eventually traced back to a secret account hidden between a layer of shell corporations belonging to none other than Wilson Fisk.

Matt leaned hard against the wall and exhaled a long sigh of relief. “Oh my God,” he said, shaking his head. Domestic terrorism meant guaranteed jail time, no bond, no parole until trial—not even now. Natasha had come through in a big, big way.

“You did it,” Theo said, and Matt levered off the wall to hug him.

“I had nothing to do with it,” he said, unexpectedly emotional. “But you’re safe. That’s all I care about.”

“You think so?”

“Safer, anyway,” Matt said. “Thank God.”

“Let’s knock off early and go to Josie’s,” Theo said.

“Okay,” Matt said, but just then, he heard his phone buzz on his desk, calling Natasha’s name, and he excused himself to answer it.

“Thank you,” he said.

“It was nothing,” Natasha said. “Men like him always hang themselves eventually.”

“He’ll find a way to get out of it.”

“Maybe,” Natasha said. “But he’ll miss the election.”

“How’s Clint?”

She sighed. “Starting to heal. It’s—he’ll never be the same, of course. I don’t think any of us have any illusions about redemption, but he’s starting to warm up to the idea that he could still do some good in this world.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“I still don’t know if we did the right thing,” Natasha admitted.

“If sending Fisk to prison and keeping Clint out is the dirtiest compromise we have to make in this new world we’re living in, I’ll take it.”

“I guess so,” Natasha said, “I think what’s weighing on me most is that I don’t know how to forgive him for what he’s done. I don’t know if I ever will.”

“You need to heal, too,” Matt said.

“We all do, I guess,” Natasha said. “Me, Steve, Rhodey, you—we’re all just walking wounded here.”

“We have to keep doing whatever we can till the end, right?” Matt asked. “It’s all any of us can do.”

There was a long silence on Natasha’s end, but he didn’t dare interrupt it. Eventually she spoke again. “I don’t want to wait until the world calms down to see you again,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Steve is coming back up this weekend to stay with Clint. I thought, you know, maybe—”

“Yeah,” Matt said. “I’ll be here.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it, gracenm! You can find me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/PendragonBea) and [Tumblr](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


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